7/23/2009 @ 6:00PM

A Google For Rural Africa

Jonathan Gosier, one of the TED Fellows at the conference here, presented his project called QuestionBox that promises to bring answers to the curious in the most remote parts of the developing world. Gosier started by asking the question, how do we know what people want to know?
Google
knows what we want to know, and builds its search engine around those requests, but that service covers those of us in rich countries with widespread access to PCs and broadband. What about in rural Uganda?

With the help from the Grameen Foundation and a not-for-profit called OpenMind he staffed up a small call-center where mobile phone owners can call up and ask about weather, history, science, whatever they want. For those with no phones, QuestionBox sends men and women in easily identifiable T-shirts and hats into villages to take people’s questions. Gosier showed a sweet video in which a farmer in Uganda walked into a town, and asked a volunteer sitting by a hut if the Egyptian pyramids were still standing. The volunteer got on the phone, registered the question with the call center, and gave the man the answer he wanted. Smiles all around. Check it out at questionbox.org.

Design Inspired By Nature

Ross Lovegrove acclaimed product designer (iMac, Muon speakers and, a long time ago, the interiors for Japan Airlines) and wearer of very cool blue pants, spoke of his love for nature as an inspiration for product design. He spent his youth by the sea in Wales, which has the highest and lowest tides in the world. Those tides, yielding up shark’s teeth, shells and mollusks to scrutinize and collect, were all a boy needed for hours of exploration.

Ever since, he has been looking for a way to combine product design with natural design. His new series of projects he calls Genesis do just that, yielding biomorphic designs aided by advanced visualization software. Some examples: a suitcase called the 110 handmade in Japan from carbon and Kevlar fiber, and sold by the British luxury brand Globe-Trotter. It weighs an amazing 3 pounds, or 1.4 kilograms. Lovegrove likes the idea of his luggage doing its part to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by lowering the weight on airplanes.

Also check out his System X lighting design, made of flexible fluorescent tubes linked in matrices of various sizes and dimensions. They form no shadows on the ceiling and can be fitted with reflectors and sound baffles.